If you're getting like 1 fps, then your system isn't using hardware 3D acceleration.
There's one of two things that can be going on.

Your 3D system is misconfigured (more likely)

Game X is misconfigured (less likely)

The first step is to figure out which one is happening.

If you have X 4.0 (X 3.* users procede to step 2), look at the output of
X -probeonly. You'll see:

(II) XXXXXX: direct rendering enabled

or

(II) XXXXXX: direct rendering disabled

where XXXXXXX depends on which video card you have. If direct rendering is
disabled, then your X configuration is definitely faulty. Your game is not at fault.
You need to figure out why DRI is disabled. The most important tool for you to use at
this point is the `DRI Users Guide'. It is an excellently written document that gives
you step by step information on how to get DRI set up correctly on your machine. A copy
is kept at http://www.xfree86.org/4.0/DRI.html.

Note that if you pass this test, your system is CAPABLE of direct rendering. Your
libraries can still be wrong. So procede to step 2.

There is a program called glxgears which comes with the "mesademos"
package. You can get mesademos with Debian ( apt-get install
mesademos) or you can hunt for the rpm on http://www.rpmfind.net. You can also download and compile the source
yourself from the mesa homepage.

Running glxgears will show some gears turning. The xterm from which you run
glxgears will display "X frames in Y seconds = X/Y FPS". You can compare your system to
the list of benchmarks below.

CPU TYPE VIDEO CARD X VERSION AVERAGE FPS

Compiling Mesa and DRI modules yourself can increase your FPS by 15 FPS; quite a
performance boost! So if your number is, say, about 20 FPS slower than a comparable
machine, chances are that glxgears is falling back on software rendering. In other
words, your graphics card isn't 3D accelerating graphics.

More important than FPS is having a constant FPS for small and large windows. If
hardware acceleration is working, the FPS for glxgears should be nearly independent of
window size. If it's not, then you're not getting hardware
acceleration.